bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • SAHMs and the Church.

    Yesterday I was thinking about the Christian duty of a mother to care for her own children (if possible).   What is the force of that duty?  Is it objectively wrong to make other arrangements?  Is it a virtuous ideal that should be ever striven for, but is not actually a practical necessity?  Is it not really a duty at all? 

    We Catholics don’t have, as far as I know, any kind of mandate in Church teachings on the subject.  There is no Woman, thou shalt not work outside the home.  There is no condemnation of day care, nor admonition against a father’s caring for children while a mother earns money. 

    Part of this is because the question "Should a woman stay home with her children, or should she work?"  would be meaningless to a large number of Catholics.  First, we are a trans-cultural Church; what the universal Church teaches must apply to Catholics in Uganda, in Brazil, in the United States to the poor and the rich alike, in Syria, in Poland.  Second, we are an ancient Church; we pre-date the Industrial Revolution; and while practical applications have varied, the moral principles on which they’re based don’t.  In this "democracy of the dead" the Saints speak loudly.  And for most of Christian history, in most places where Christians live, woman’s work in or near her home, just like man’s work in or near his home, has been an obvious and indispensable economic contribution to the welfare of the family. 

    The mommy wars are so recent, and so confined to Certain Classes of People in Certain Countries, that the Universal Church has not bothered to speak about them in any detailed way that I am aware of (perhaps individual bishops’ conferences have; I don’t know).

    More on this later in a subsequent post.  I’m leaving for Adoration of the Blessed Thanksgiving… and if that’s Greek to you, I mean the Eucharist, of course.

    UPDATE.  Here’s Part 2.

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  • Amy starts a can’t-miss-it thread.

    Amy Welborn knows a good conversation starter:

    In honor of St. Cecilia… Post your most memorable spiritual/musical moments here. Not just your favorite hymns, but, if you can, a real moment in time in which music has revealed something to you about God, life and truth.

    Many, many comments.  Some are very moving.  Some make me want to rush out and buy chant CDs. 

    …maybe the time I sang Balshazzar’s Feast with my 4-month-pregnant wife in the audience, at the very back of the hall, (on the 4th floor, to boot)…and when we, the 200-voice chorus, did the shouted "SLAIN!!!!" our firstborn damn near jumped out of my wife’s uterus…

    The hearing of the "Salve Regina" (in Latin), after Compline, at "Nuestra Señora de Los Angeles" Trappist monastery, Azul, Argentina, some 9 or 10 years ago. It was my first retreat at a monastery.

    Once, when I was going through a pretty hard time, my little sister (who was middle school age at the time, I think) wrote out all of the words to "Be Not Afraid" and mailed it to me, along with some other words of encouragement. It meant so much to me then and now, when I hear that song I can’t help but think of the comfort it gave me when I read those words in my sister’s letter. I still have the letter.

    Each time I listen to Bach’s Mass in B Minor, I am reminded that God really does exist. It is the aural equivalent of walking along a long, deserted ocean beach in early autumn, after the crowds have gone but before it’s too cold to endure the wind coming off the water. I know this sounds melodramatic, but ’tis true. It may be sad to say so, but I do need this sort of reminder from time to time. Thank you, God, for the Atlantic Ocean and for J.S. Bach.

    …one morning our eclectic local station played a piece so beautiful I actually had to pull over because I was tearing up. I recognized the first verse of Psalm 51 in Latin, and the music matched the psalm so perfectly that it took my breath away. It made me want to rush over to the church and confess all my sins.

    My brothers and I singing a folksy arrangement of the Lord’s Prayer at my sister’s wedding. It wasn’t the harmonies or the arrangement that made it spiritual. It was four Catholic guys singing lovingly to their very pregnant sister in her groom’s Baptist church with just family and a few friends and God looking on. So many opportunities for that to have gone horribly, but grace saved the day, and the 16 years since.

    Many, many more at the link.  Enjoy.

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  • Hyphens are your friends.

    OK, this is funny.

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  • “Normal Life, with More Pancakes.”

    Amy Welborn points to this review of a collection of columns by WaPo columnist Marjorie Williams, who died at age 47 of cancer.  She left behind two young children.  I was struck by this bit:

    But the real anchor of the section, the stunning, unflinching "Hit by Lightning: A Cancer Memoir," leaves behind the world of other people’s ambition and focuses instead on her own, which was far more urgent: to cheat death, at least for a time.

    "Having found myself faced with that old bull-session question (What would you do if you found out you had a year to live?)," she wrote, "I learned that a woman with children has the privilege or duty of bypassing the existential. What you do, if you have little kids, is lead as normal a life as possible, only with more pancakes."

    Amy comments:

    Not much time, not much time. Yes, eternity awaits, but if the time we have on earth didn’t matter- we wouldn’t have been given it.

    Important thoughts.  Incidentally, I had a dream last night that I knew I had only a few days to live.  It was realistic enough that when I woke in the morning dark I believed, for a moment, that I was still in it.  Wish I remembered more details.

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  • “I can’t cook.” One reason why some may think so.

    I often wonder about people who say they "can’t cook."   My wondering usually goes like this:  Can’t pretty much anyone, if he is unhampered by serious learning disability, follow a recipe? 

    I mean, I understand that there’s a gift to recipe creation.  Let me give you an example:  Suppose a person opens the fridge and the cabinets and surveys the interior of each.  She thinks:  hmmm.  I have arugula.  And a pomegranate.  And some anchovies.  And some pecans.  And various bottles of oils and such.   And some Parmesan cheese.   Many perfectly intelligent people, confronted with this particular melange, would not have the slightest idea how to make dinner in this situation.  But another sort of person would immediately think, "Aha!  I can make a salad out of all this!"  This would not make the second person any better, just different, from the first person.  (A better person would know to leave out the Parmesan and anchovies.)

    Leaving that aside, though, why do so many people say they can’t cook?  How hard can it be to read a recipe, buy the ingredients, take them home, and… follow the directions?

    Mark has suggested that the problem is selecting the right recipes to cook — recipes that are consummate with the cook’s experience level, available time, and equipment.  That is part of it, I think.  But it occurred to me today as I prepared to cook dinner that maybe the problem isn’t following a recipe.  Perhaps the problem is following multiple recipes all at the same time. 

    I have been cooking for years.  Tonight I am making a new recipe for hunter-style chicken (chasseur, a French relative of cacciatore)  that appeared in the Nov/Dec 2005 issue of Cook’s Illustrated.  (Link does not go to recipe, sorry.)  I’m also serving noodles; roasted green beans; and salad.

    So anyway, when I started thinking about dinner this afternoon I picked up the chasseur recipe and thought something like this: 

    How long to cook the whole thing?  5 minutes sauteing the chicken breasts on one side, 5 minutes on the other, then the mushrooms and onions in the same pan for 8 minutes (let’s say 10).   Add wine and deglaze, that’s about 3 minutes (let’s say 5) and then the whole thing simmers for 25 minutes.  Chicken roasts at the same time for only 15 minutes.  So that takes 25+5+10+5+5 = 50 minutes.  About an hour.  So I want to get that chicken in the pan about 6:00 for a 7:00 dinner. 

    I can wash the greens and make some kind of  salad [n.b. No pomegranates in this one] while the sauce is simmering — no need to worry about that.  And the noodles just cook on the stove top.  That’s no problem, because the chicken will only take one burner.

    Now, what about the beans?  Can they roast in the oven alongside the chicken?  [Check recipe] The chicken goes in at 400 degrees [n.b. Fahrenheit], but the beans really need 450 degrees.  I could do the beans for longer, but would they brown enough?  Better do them first.  I can reheat them at dinner time.  They take 20 minutes.  The chicken needs 10 minutes in the pan, and I’ll need some time to prep too.  So I’ll heat the oven to 450 and roast the beans while I do the prep and start the chicken in the pan.  When the beans are done I’ll turn the oven down to 400 and start the chicken roasting.  

    Now, none of this is fundamentally difficult to understand.  I’d like to think that anyone could figure this out given detailed-enough recipes, plenty of pencils and paper, and a whole afternoon to plan it.  But who would want to?    I sure didn’t do it that way.  I have a lot of experience.  It took me less than five minutes to decide, just from looking at two recipes, exactly what steps to take and in what order.  And that doesn’t even include the many unconscious decisions that went into things like choosing the right side dishes; deciding that  400 degrees might not work for the beans; substitute sherry for the brandy I don’t keep around; not trying to flambe the sherry; testing the pasta for doneness… you name it.

    It’s so easy to forget, once we’ve gained a skill, how much learning lies behind it.

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  • Tracking down your deadbeat donor.

    Family Scholars Blog reports on an interesting development.  All by himself, a fifteen-year-old boy tracked down his own Very Special Man who fifteen years earlier had masturbated into a cup for money:

    By submitting a DNA sample to a commercial genetic database service designed to help people draw their family tree, the youth found a crucial clue that quickly enabled him to track down his long-sought parent.

    “I was stunned,” said Wendy Kramer, whose online registry for children trying to find anonymous donors of sperm or egg helped lead the teenager to his father. “This had never been done before. No one knew you could get a DNA test and find your donor.”

    The people who freeze and thaw ejaculate for money are, predictably, offended:

    “I think it’s unethical. It’s an invasion of the donor’s privacy and a breach of contract,” said Cappy M. Rothman of the California Cryobank of Los Angeles, another large sperm bank. “If we were to expose our donors to being known, we would have many fewer donors.”

    A breach of contract?!  Who breached the contract?  The child certainly didn’t sign one! 

    FSB’s take on that:  "How convenient that the ethical thing to do is also the thing that least interfers with your ability to make a profit!" 

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  • Breed ’em and weep – birth story.

    I mentioned a couple of days ago that Alice at finslippy had put up a birth story.  I can’t believe I missed the link to the one at breed ’em and weep.

    “Five centimeters.” They seemed very, very surprised.

    “Five centimeters? Isn’t that good?” asked David.

    “We just don’t see a lot of women laughing at five centimeters.”

    I was bad-ass. Bad-ass! These hips are made for birthin’ and that’s just what they’ll do, one of these days these hips ARE GONNA BIRTH ALL OVER YOU.

    Read it!

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  • Religious persecution in North Korea.

    The word "persecution" is tossed about rather casually here in the U. S., along with the milder "religious discrimination." 

    First Things reports on North Korea:

    This week, the commission [Commission on International Religious Freedom], which operates out of the State Department, issued a blistering report on religious persecution in North Korea.

    Based on eyewitness accounts of those who have fled the North Korean dictatorship, the stories curdle the blood. For instance, in the building of a highway near Pyongyang, a house was demolished and a Bible was discovered hidden between bricks. Along with it was a list identifying a Christian pastor, two assistant pastors, two elders, and 20 members of the congregation.

    All were rounded up and the five Christian leaders were told they could avoid death if they denied their faith and swore to serve only Kim Jong Il and his father, Kim Il Sung, the founder of the communist dictatorship. Refusing to do so, they were forced to lie down and a steamroller used in the highway construction was driven over them.

    Martyrs.

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  • Claim the mys!

    Everybody knows by now that Amazon.com has a new feature called "Statistically Improbable Phrases" (a name that for me recalls The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but that’s another story).  I suspect these are more gadgetry than usefulness. 

    Amazon.com’s Statistically Improbable Phrases, or "SIPs", are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!™ program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.

    SIPs are not necessarily improbable within a particular book, but they are improbable relative to all books in Search Inside!.

    This morning I was looking on Amazon for a copy of the hymnal our parish uses.  The list of SIPs is kind of fun, strewn with lyric-shrapnel from the impact of all the hyphens:

    stored our life, fore your throne, ceive our prayer, stroyed our death, claim your death, have mer, your glo, claim the mys, est heav, day our dai, dore thee, dore him, sus lives, all glo, ing spir, lis pec, nal rest, com pas, our mak, ver flows, qui tol, his glo, thy mer, our tres, gels sing

    Most of the bits are not from hymns, but from parts of the Mass.  At least two of them (at first glance) are from the Our Father.  Little bits of the Latin Agnus Dei too. 

    I guess that makes sense.  There are a lot of Protestant hymnals, after all, so those would tend to share language with Catholic hymnals, making those phrases not particularly "improbable."  Except for the Mass parts, which are unique to Catholic hymnals.   

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  • Finslippy birth story!

    Alice at finslippy finally got around to writing and posting a birth story for Henry (who’s three).

    I am not usually a fan of hospital birth stories, but this one is fun to read.

    Because of the epidural that had robbed me of all ability to feel what was happening to my poor vagina, I was spared the so-called Ring of Fire sensation, in which the baby’s head stretching everything to its outermost limits and beyond, causing you to believe your vestibule may in fact be aflame. Nonetheless I still had Johnny Cash in my head as I pooshed. And pooshed. Love is a burnin’ thing. Doo doo-doo doo-doo doo doo doooo. And it makes a fiery ring. “Look at his eyelashes!” the nurse exclaimed, and my husband looked down and said, “Oh my god,” and I said, “Are they longer than his head? Is he some kind of fringed freak? Will he make us some circus money?” Only I didn’t say any of these things because I was mooing.

    Read the whole thing…

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  • Defying the critics.

    Ann Althouse pointed to this quote by Jean Cocteau:

    "Note just what it is about your work the critics don’t like, then cultivate it.  That’s the part of your work that’s individual and worth keeping."

    There’s some discussion in the comments to her post about whether this is always, sometimes, or never true, and under what conditions.   I think it’s probably sometimes true.

    How do you know?  Perhaps it has to do with how much you respect the critics in question (and if the only reason you don’t respect them is because of what they say about you, you should probably re-evaluate that.) 

    I put this post under "New paradigms in homemaking" because that’s my main work right now.  In general, after all, a mother’s choice to stay home attracts a great deal of criticism (to be fair, so does the choice to work outside the home).

    Of course, I don’t have too many critics of my homemaking in specific, and the ones I do have (at least the ones who would say so to my face) are uniformly critics I respect.  I am picturing the following conversation:

    MARK:  I think you should wash the quilt on the kids’ bed.  It smells like pee.

    ME:  I suppose I shouldn’t expect someone like you to understand my art.

    Nevertheless I think I’ll keep the quote in mind…

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  • Actions and intentions.

    I saw a quote today (I don’t know who originally wrote it) that I liked:

    We see our actions in light of our intentions; we see others’ intentions in light of their actions.

    Seems like a good thing to keep in mind as a parent and as a spouse, doesn’t it? 

    We should try to ‘see’ the intention that the other sees when acting or responding.

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